Abortion, a right that is not really a right in South Korea and Poland

Abortion rights remain in a gray area in South Korea and Poland. Theoretically, it is possible to have recourse to an abortion in certain cases, but very few are practiced in practice, so much so that abortion is hardly considered legal.

In Poland, the abortion law is getting tougher

Since 2020, abortion has almost become illegal on Polish soil. Doctors even left a pregnant woman to die on May 24, victim of sepsis. In three years, she is the sixth woman to die of pregnancy in a hospital in the country. With the tightening of the law on abortion, anyone who performs an abortion or helps a woman to have an abortion risks up to three years in prison, or even eight years if the fetus is viable.

South Korea and its legal vacuum around abortion

In South Korea, if the practice of abortion is no longer criminalized since 2021, nothing guarantees the right to abortion either. A legal vacuum puts South Korean women in a precarious situation. In 2019, South Korea’s highest court declared the nearly 70-year-old law that banned abortion unconstitutional, and asked the government to take steps to regulate it before January 1, 2021. Since then, the situation has not evolved. For fear of losing the ultra-conservative religious electorate or the feminist electorate, neither the right nor the Democrats have moved things.